James Simpson

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Research Professor of English at Harvard University. He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His books are Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (London: Longman, 1995;  rev. ed. 2007); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007); Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (2010); and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (2019). With Christopher Canon, he co-edited The Oxford Chaucer (2024). His textual interests range across late medieval and early modern Western European literature, theology, art, and politics, 1150-1690. The issues that engage him are the cultural disciplines of revolutionary evangelical modernity, and how we survived them.